Monday Oct 29, 2012

As previously blogged in the EBS 11i and 12.1 Support Timeline Changes entry, two important changes to the Oracle Lifetime Support policies were announced at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 - San Francisco. These changes affect E-Business Suite Releases 11i and 12.1.

Critical Patch Updates for EBS 11i during the Exception to Sustaining Support Period

You may be wondering about the availability of Critical Patch Updates (CPU) for EBS 11i
during the Exception to Sustaining Support period. The following
details the E-Business Suite Critical Patch Update support policy for EBS 11i during the Exception to Sustaining Support period:

CPUs will be packaged and released as as cumulative patches for both ATG RUP 6 and ATG RUP 7.

As always, we try to minimize the number of patches and dependencies required for uptake of a CPU; however, there have been quite a few changes to the 11i baseline since its release. For dependency reasons the 11i CPUs may require a higher number of files in order to bring them up to a consistent, stable, and well tested level.

EBS 11i customer will continue to receive CPUs up to and including the October 2014 CPU.

Where can I learn more?

There are two interlocking policies that affect the E-Business
Suite: Oracle's Lifetime Support policies for each EBS release
(timelines which were updated by this announcement), and the Error
Correction Support policies (which state the minimum baselines for new
patches).

Things
get more complicated when one considers individual techstack components
such as Oracle Forms or the Oracle Database. To learn more about the interlocking EBS+techstack component support
windows, see these two articles:

The Critical Patch Update Advisory
is the starting point for relevant information. It includes a list of
products affected, pointers to obtain the patches, a summary of
the security vulnerabilities, and links to other important documents.